Lately, I have not stopped running numbers about my life.
I think about how many hours I spend with the kids. I count how many nights I worked late. I program my phone to check how much time I spend on social media (then inevitably easily crosses the maximum amount I set for myself). Recently, on a perfect spring day, I peeled myself off the computer chair for a run, and after passing the elementary school where my eldest would study for a few more months, and saw moms and dads running out the doors holding small hands, all I could think about was: Am I taking advantage of the time Mine properly?
The clock of course always ticked. But there was something in that moment. The plague has shown us how limited our time is. Meanwhile, many workers, who connect from home or get into hybrid arrangements, are no longer in a situation where their time is set by someone else as it was when the boss was one cube away in a spice way, five days a week. We are groping for a new normalcy, whatever it may be, which has more autonomy, more flexibility and also a change of perspective.
“When you do the math, it really hits you,” Nick Meising, a 43-year-old research director at Sentieo, a financial intelligence platform, told me. “Are you doing the important things?”
The Corona has routed some people to big changes – moving to a remote location, resigning, working two jobs at the same time. But for those who are relatively satisfied with the scaffolding of their lives, sometimes there is not much to escape, only the ongoing privilege and with it the pressure to get out of our days as much as possible.
Maizing also examined the data. He found that most of the time he spent with his son, who is now 10, would disappear until the child turned 18. So he tried to leave the phone in the other room when they were together and set it to ring only when one of the contacts called. When he goes to school with his son, they talk – they really talk.
There is not a single minute that is not held accountable
Gail Bennett, a lawyer from the Seattle area, measures her work days at six-minute intervals, thanks to a billing structure for clients that requires her to count time particles. When she wakes up sometimes in the middle of the night, she says that sometimes she really feels what time it is – say, 2:31 – and sees it as a miracle, it’s exactly what her watch shows.
On weekends and holidays, she tends to schedule activity after activity and there is not a single minute that is not held accountable. But she wonders, is that true.
“Maybe I should relax a little more,” she said.
We are enchanted by the idea that there is a way to control and manage time, says Oliver Burkman, author of “4,000 Weeks,” a book titled The Average Number of Weeks in a Whole Life. We outsource and delegate, listen to the advice of time management gurus who want to streamline everything, and always assure ourselves that next week we will be less busy.
“Release that fantasy that you’re going to tidy up your life and manage everything,” Burkman says.
Instead of trying to downplay the piles of letters waiting to be treated, getting to the inbox with zero new messages or doing vi on every task on our to-do list, one should simply acknowledge that we do not even have time for some of the things we want or need to do. You will learn to live with this feeling – sometimes it is uncomfortable, sometimes really anxious – that at every moment there are many things that need your attention, he said. Then: “Do the most important things.”
Enjoy the little things
What are these important things? This is something that has become clear recently, one positive side of at least everything that has happened in the last two years – war, violence and weapons, the virus. Joe Holt, a professor of business administration at the University of Notre Dame and a former pastor who divides his time between South Bend, Indiana and the suburbs of Chicago, spent parts of 2020 and 2021 volunteering in the intensive care unit as an assistant nurse.
“These days have made me appreciate time,” he said of the times he helped patients suffering from corona. He enjoys the little things: the ability to get out of bed, to walk in the sun. As someone who had never had big plans, Holt began to set goals for himself, such as completing the Iron Man triathlon.
“Part of it is because my body is working right now, but who knows where I will be in another year or two,” he says. “I’m more determined and decisive when it comes to things like that.”
It can still be difficult to know why to refuse and what to put in high priority. Procrastination and fatigue make incoming decisions. Try to imagine with what decision you would live in peace in a year or in a decade, recommends Alan Burdick, author of a book on the biology and psychology of the time.
Time is weird, amorphous and flexible, he says, and has the potential to accelerate or slow down because of many factors ranging from how much we love something and how busy we are. Basically, time is really a matter of memory and what we continue to keep with us after the seconds have passed.
Being present often means doing less. Bevin Magford worked close to 90 hours a week in 2020, helping to change the direction of the clothing company where she worked as a senior manager during the epidemic closures. Every time sales went up, she got an adrenaline rush. “It’s becoming an addiction,” she said.
One morning in December 2020, she was so exhausted that she could not get out of bed. She went on a six-month sabbatical, and spent her days meditating, therapy and writing about the feelings aroused by her son’s death a few years earlier.
At first, without the meetings that would have started at six in the morning and the achievement lists, she felt disconnected. But she got used to the new rhythm. She now works as a consultant for her company, and she has taken breaks during her working days – during lunch she sees an episode of “Law and Order”, and at 16:55 in the afternoon she stops everything, including not getting headphones, and goes to the gym alone. She feels calmer, more present in the moment, as if she finally has a spice to herself.
“It was during this quiet time that I realized how to prioritize my time,” she said.